RE: Escaping Characters in Dynamic data.

If you want to produce valid XML from database fields, you must either
escape XML-critical characters (<, &, ', " at least) or, as you suggest,
enclose them in CDATA brackets.  If you're the one doing this conversion,
then you can decide which of these is better for you.  If you're using
someone else's product which doesn't do the conversion properly, then it is
producing malformed XML and you should ask for your money back.

PC2

-----Original Message-----
From: Owen [mailto:owen@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: February 13, 2001 00:57
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:  Escaping Characters in Dynamic data.


Hi all,

I have come across a problem when processing XML files produced dynamically
by a script pulling back data from a database. If there are reserved XML
characters within the database content being retrieved then some XML parsers
will throw up an error (depending on the character), so preventing further
processing (in this case transformation to html). The only (unsatisfactory)
solution I can think of at the moment is to CDATA every field I retrieve
dynamically, as I have no control over the input into the database. Is this
_really_ the way to go? If so, I presume this incurs no great overhead?

I'd appreciate any (almost :-) ) comments.

Thanks,

Owen.



 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list